The Unreal "Thought System" of Religious Beliefs Part II

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt said there are two ways to get to the truth: the way of the scientist and the way of the lawyer. The scientist observes evidence and looks for patterns and relationships, testing theories to explain them. The lawyer starts with the preferred conclusion and then looks for ways of interpreting everything as evidence to support his view while also trying to discredit evidence or arguments to the contrary. Both are equally trying to find truth, but the two kinds of truth they are trying to find are very different from each other. But just because they are different doesn't mean they are mutually exclusive or wholly incompatible with each other. Rather, they are merely two ways our mind has for perceiving what we call reality. 

Both of these perspectives live within each of us, vying for control of the meaning we give to our perceptions and, by extension, our lives. The difference is that one is trying to express a more rationalistic truth while the other seeks to express a more emotional truth. Both truths are equally valid, mind you, but because they are not the same, they are often perceived to be in conflict with each other. Yet the real conflict is the person's inability to see how two different kinds of truth are like noticing that light is both a particle and a wave.  The problem is that although our brains happen to be decent scientists, they are truly outstanding lawyers. The former is more a function of our rational brain observing our emotional brain, like a parent watching over their child, while the latter is more of a function of our childlike emotional brain trying to manipulate our parental brain. 

Environment is crucial in nurturing our ability to not only become aware of, but to toggle between engaging, our inner scientist and lawyer. The latter is the press secretary and public relations expert for our own beliefs, while we use the former to critique everyone else's beliefs but our own. The inner lawyer operates under pressure, which sharpens our focus and enhances our ability to see patterns even where none exist. The inner scientist seeks to learn by painstakingly piecing together the tiniest of pieces to understand the whole puzzle. The former reflects the way we remember things like the logic of the multiplication tables, the latter reflects how we learn that logic, which is to do our multiplication tables for homework, night after bloody night. We learn in long-hand but we remember in short hand. And these two ways of learning and remembering merely reflect the mechanical way we slowly advance the one, and the creative way we remember the other. 

 Most of the time, our inner lawyer and our inner scientist interact with each other differently when dealing with our own beliefs versus dealing with the beliefs of others. Rarely operating without each exerting some influence on the other, we argue like a lawyer for our own beliefs but are as skeptical as a scientist of the beliefs of others. And we do so out of a need to defend an ego that, unlike a child learning a new language or a computer playing chess, doesn't like to be wrong. That's because pure logic, like pure numbers that computers use to calculate, feel no emotional pain from a wrong answer. But our egos do. 

For a variety of reasons, both our inner scientist and our inner lawyer are limited to interfacing with reality through the stained-glass windows of perception. And the windows of perception are stained by experience and the stories we tell ourselves. But the former strives to be aware of how the stain on the glass colors our perception by testing and questioning both the story we tell ourselves, along with new information and the internal biases that color our interpretations of such information, while the latter strives to find ways of interpreting new information in ways that always conform to, and therefore only confirm, the stain of the story and "beliefs" it started with. One strives to scrub away the biases that color its view, greeting everything that  makes it more aware of such biases as a friend and a teacher, while the other treats its biases as sacred traditions or revelations that must be defened or even worshiped, and treats anything and anyone who reveals such biases as simply a story as an enemy bent on deception.    

 More than anything else, our inner lawyer is trained in the school of hard knocks that is our experiences.  Whether mostly supportive or critical, such experiences trains our inner lawyer to tell us a story in which we see ourselves in either a more positive or negative light. While it's hard to fool the internal scientist with blatant lies, the ambiguity of information on the one hand, and the capacity for creativity on the other, allows our internal lawyer a lot of room to maneuver - especially when the lawyer is free to bend, and at times uses the Trojan horse of rhetoric to hide how it simply breaks,  the rules of logic. Our inner lawyer, in other words, does a great job of making the voice of our inner child sound as authoritative as our inner parental scientist, while dismissing the critiques of our inner parental scientist as simply the voice of a naïve child. This is why we so often have a view of ourselves, whether overly negative or positive, that is different from the view others may have of us. 

Our inner scientist and lawyer are both just trying to help us understand the world around us. The difference is that the former is more collaborative with different perspectives and open to change while the latter is more adversarial and defensive and looking for those who agree with it. One is more liberal, in this sense, the other more conservative. While both are motivated by the same desire to protect us, one grows out of an environment that nurtures authenticity and self-compassion, and sees change as the only constant, while the other grows out of an environment dominated by attachment and self-criticism, and sees perfection as an unchanging point to aspire to. For one, the infinite is an ever evolving thing, for the other it is as fixed and established as God.  

As Richard Carlson explains,  "All of us, from the time we are infants, have a natural desire to make sense out of life. We relate facts, compare events, and make determinations out of what we see. In the process, we automatically form thought systems: a self contained  thinking unit through which we interpret the world." Like a pair of sunglasses we never take off, those sunglasses color our perceptions of everything we are exposed to. It's as if our head is a fishbowl full of water and our mind's eye is the goldfish that swims in that water. Every experience we have adds its own coloring to the water our mind's eye is swimming in and peering out at the world through. So natural and gradual is the process by which the clear water of our own mind is colored by experiences and the meaning we give them that we are altogether unaware it is happening at all. The wisdom of age, as such, occurs when what colors that water begins to fade, and we once again see life as we are about to exit it as clearly as we saw it upon our entrance into it.

The difference between our inner scientist and our inner lawyer is that the former strives to become aware of, and to wash out as much as possible, the coloring that has been added to that water, that make perceptions so subjective, while the latter either denies that any such coloring has been added or is skewing their perception or that, if it has or is, it only helps to enhance their ability to see more objectively.  Both strive to reveal a deeper truth, but one sees experience as clouding our ability to see a deeper revelation while the other sees experience as sharpening our perceptions. 

"For example, if you grew up in a family where there was a huge emphasis on money, where every dinner conversation centered around the subject, that information would be stored as the core of your thought system. Thus you would be predisposed to placing an enormous emphasis on money. And because your thought system is filled up with certain types of information, you simply never question your own way of looking at life - it just seems right to you." The concept of "money," as such, because the filter through which you see the world, without realizing that other people see the world through a different filter. 

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear," Carlson continues, "there's nothing wrong with your thought system. The way it developed was innocent. You were simply given a set of facts that were represented as "truth" and unless you are a very rare exception to the human species, you bought the information hook, line, and sinker. What else could you do? You were a child eager to learn about life. When you parents and other important role models gave you information (being purely innocent, and thus lacking any understanding of deception) you accepted it as truthful. Overtime, you stored this so-called truth in your memory until you could see life no other way, all the while developing conditioned responses to certain information that seemed important and appropriate (and truthful) to you."

"To compound the problem, thought systems have a very strong, almost insidious tendency to validate themselves. Because your thought system is filled with information about your own past, it looks for examples to prove to itself that it is "right."' Because the information we are taught as children is the substance that our memories of ourselves is comprised, our desire to confirm that information is also a desire to confirm who we see ourselves to be is as valid as the beliefs we feel our identity is made up of."

 In the Bible, God describes Himself as "the great I am." The "I am" in this case is the identity we create from the beliefs that were used like scaffolding to build the skeleton of our spiritual ego. Like Dr. Frankenstein, with parts from the graves of old philosophies, religions, and cultures, our mind sutures an ego together into a seamless garment of a story we tell ourselves, a story we  relied on to become who we see ourselves to be today. And to deny the story, or even just one piece or detail of the story, can shatter our belief of who we are, and destroy who we tell ourselves "I am."

Because of the self-validating nature of our thought systems, we will always be tempted to continue thinking in the way that we are accustomed. Not doing so is like cutting off our own emotional and intellectual roots. If "I am" not who "I am," in other words, then who am I?

'The concept of an ego is very closely related to that of a thought system. Both are thought-created. The truth is that human beings don't even have egos - there is no such thing. People only have egos because they think they do. Your ego is your idea of (thoughts about) who you think you are (about who "I am"). Descarte's idea of "I think therefore I am" reflects the idea that we have ideas of who we think we are. "I am ..." you name it: a Catholic, a Republican, an accountant, a football fan, a human being, you name it. What we see ourselves to be is the result of thinking of what "I am." And video games, sports, movies, stories, drugs, addictions, etc, all free us from thinking of what "I am" and allows us to see ourselves as someone, something, totally different.

The lawyer inside of us wants to cling to one story of who "I am," when we fear being someone, or something, else. But it will also strive to argue for being whoever "I am" wishes to become when we are not afraid, when we feel accepted as being able to be anything and everything we wish. The scientist within us tries mostly to see why our inner lawyer argues for the former in some people, and the latter in others.